Facebook/The Good CemetarianThis man spends his only day off a week cleaning army veterans’ gravestones in an unbelievable act of kindness.
If you only had one day off a week, most likely you’d spend it chilling with friends and family or down the pub – almost certainly nothing productive…
However, Sundays for Andrew Lumish are far from a day of rest. Instead he gets down and dirty with a scrubbing brush and heads to graveyards around Tampa, Florida, in a bid to clean up veterans’ tombstones.
The 46-year-old who has his own cleaning service, spends up to ten hours a day, cleaning and scouring away at the gravestones of long dead army heroes, in a bid to honour their life’s work and sacrifice, CBS reports.
Sometimes the gravestones are particularly weathered and decayed and can take months to clean up, so in the meantime, Andrew makes it his mission to learn about the person beneath the grave in order to keep their memory alive.
Andrew has now polished up over 300 graves and has even started photographing them to document his work and the lives of the lost-but-not-forgotten heroes.
He told the Tampa Bay Times:
Something bothered me. Their final resting places were total disasters. They’d been neglected from the time they’d been buried.
The grave-cleaner takes his work very seriously and hopes to breathe life back into the memories of the long dead heroes and help to keep them alive today.
He told CBS News:
If [people] can’t read it at all, they can’t celebrate it, they can’t honour that person, they can’t appreciate that person.
Whereas if you properly restore the monuments, you can begin an entire conversation, and potentially — in a figurative sense – bring that person back to life.
Once his handywork is complete, Andrew shares a post to his aptly titled Facebook page The Good Cemetarian and even shares a few titbits of information from the lost person’s life.
He told Reader’s Digest:
Some of these guys, who some consider heroes, would leave their wife for another woman, and leave six kids.
It’s a war hero who won a medal of honour for serving in the Civil War and was thrown in jail for not paying child support. … It’s like the Real Housewives of 1985.
What a kind and selfless way to spend a Sunday. He might be doing his bit to help the heroes of the past, but this guy too is a true hero.
What a legend.
